TEI Members Meeting 2002: Elections

TEI Council

TEI Board

Candidates' Statements

Alejandro G. Bia has a BS and a MS degree in Computer Sciences from ORT University, a Diploma in Computing and Information Systems from Oxford University and is finishing his PhD thesis on Computing Methods to Automate the Production of Digital Resources in Digital Libraries at the University of Alicante. Currently he is working as Subdirector of Research and Development at the Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library of the University of Alicante, where the results of his ongoing research are being put to practice. He also works as a lecturer at the department of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis of the School of Entrepreneurial Sciences of the University of Alicante.

In the past he has worked as Special-Projects Manager at NetGate (1996), Documentation Editor of the GeneXus project at Advanced Research and Technology (ARTech) (1991-1994), and worked at the Telephone Traffic Processing Unit of ANTEL (1994-1989). He has been a lecturer on Operating Systems, Computer Organization, Computer Networks and English for Computer Sciences at ORT University (1990-1996). His current fields of interest are: digitisation automation by computer methods, digital preservation, digitisation metrics and cost estimates, texts structuring and markup languages.

He writes: I am very pleased to be a candidate for the TEI Council. I can contribute in several ways towards the spread of the TEI markup scheme, specially in Spanish speaking countries. In this sense, we have already translated to Spanish some technical reference documents like the TEI Lite: An Introduction to Text Encoding for Interchange: (Document No.: TEI U5) and of the Bare Bones TEI (Document No. TEI U6). At the MCDL we also work as a reference institution for those digitization projects in the Hispanic world which are interested in using the TEI. This includes efforts of mutual cooperation with scholarly groups, the organization of courses, seminars, and other training and support activities.

I consider a very important goal for the TEI community to solve the migration from TEI-SGML to TEI-XML. I believe that software tools can be built to partially automate this task. Another important goal is the development of training materials, courses, guides-of-good-practice, examples and software tools to ease the learning process in order to expand the community of users. If elected I will try to play an active role in reaching these objectives.

David J. Birnbaum is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh (USA). His research interests are derived from his extensive experience in applying computer technology to the study of medieval Slavic manuscripts, and his publications and conference presentations have addressed both specific and general issues pertaining to character set standardization and structured text technology. In the world of TEI administration he has served on the TEI Council and has been a very active member of the TEI Character Set working group.

Gregory Crane writes: I learned about SGML initially from Elli Mylonas and her colleagues at Brown (Allen Renear and Steve DeRose) in 1984. Their analysis of SGML and its potential substantively shaped the way in which we planned the development of the Perseus Digital Library in the middle eighties. We invested heavily in SGML encoding before the TEI existed and Elli, then one of the leaders of the Perseus Project, helped contribute to the TEI guidelines. We at Perseus have been avid supporters of the TEI and have urged our collaborators (not always successfully) to follow the TEI rather than create yet more DTDs for particular projects.

My current research centers on the interactions between back-end datastructures and front-end user interaction. On top of our initial classical collections, we at Perseus have created substantive collections on the History of Science, the history and topography of London and its environs, Shakespeare and Early Modern English, the US Civil War and other topics. My personal goal has been to study the needs of different fields and the problems of different document sets. The TEI has proven a very powerful instrument by which we can capture many of the differences and commonalities of these collections. While Perseus covers a variety of media, my personal interests remain centered on language. I am particularly interested in applying the TEI for automated and semi-automated tagging (syntactic and/or morphological analysis; automatic content extraction and other language technologies).

David Durand writes: As a candidate for the TEI council I reflect a more technical side of the TEI. I am a computer scientist, who's worked on hypertext, collaborative editing of documents (my dissertation research) and markup theory. I worked for the TEI on TEI P1-P3, as a member of the committees on Metalanguage and Syntax and Hypertext. Steve DeRose and I wrote Making Hypermedia Work: A User's Guide to HyTime. I would like to see the issue of customization (re-)addressed, as part of moving TEI to XML. The pizza chef represents one approach, automating the control of customization features that proved hard for users to manage themselves. I would like to see if the use of architectural form ideas or one of the new schema languages for XML can simplify this process so that a specialized tool will not be necessary.

Kirk V. Hastings writes: I am a development programmer at the California Digital Library, which is charged with the selection, building, management, and preservation of the University's shared collections of digital resources. I have also worked at the Institute of Advanced Technologies in the Humanities and UC Berkeley Library. My particular area of expertise is the application of XML and its related standards to academic publishing and the distribution of digitized primary resources within the library context. I have used TEI extensively for the encoding of academic monographs, as well as a whole range of primary resource formats. I am very familiar with the TEI DTD, guidelines, extension mechanisms, and limitations. I am most interested in how TEI could be more extensively used in the publishing and library worlds.

Fotis Jannidis writes: I have studied German and English literature and worked in the computer department of our faculty. At the moment I am teaching German literature at the university of Munich.

My main interests are literary theory, narratology and humanities computing, especially the creation and the use of electronic editions. I am co-editor of the Jahrbuch fuer Computerphilologie : , a German website and yearbook on humanities computing. I am also co-editor of the electronic edition The young Goethe, which is encoded in TEI. At the moment we are working on a framework to put TEIlite encoded texts on the net. Another line of interest is the encoding of manuscripts for diplomatic transcriptions (I am working on a proposal for a grant for a working group). As head of the commission for editorial applications in the working group for German editions (this name was not my idea) I am working on promoting TEI as a standard format for literary editions in Germany by giving lectures and providing training seminars.

William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. (PhD, English, University of Chicago, 1980) is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Georgia. His major publications include Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English: (with Clive Upton and Rafal Konopka, Oxford U Press, 2001); Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data: (with Edgar Schneider, Sage Publications, 1996); Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States: (with Virginia McDavid, Theodore Lerud, and Ellen Johnson; U Chicago Press, 1993). The primary outlet for his Linguistic Atlas research is the Linguistic Atlas web site. Current work on the Atlas pursues three primary targets: 1) creation of text-encoding and presentation format for Atlas interviews which will allow for linked text, sound, maps, and analytical information for a wide range of users; 2) advanced methods of quantitative analysis, including technical geography; and 3) creation of new field work methods which will support research in speech sciences and NLP as well as linguistic geography and sociolinguistics. He is interested in literature as well as linguistics and lexicography, as shown by his special issue of Language and Literature (vol. 10.2, 2001) on literary dialect analysis with computer assistance. He served as editor of Journal of English Linguistics for 15 years. He now serves as editor-in-chief for three Linguistic Atlas projects (LAMSAS, LANCS, LAWS) and a board member for several others; as an executive board member for the American Dialect Society and the Association for Computers and the Humanities; and as an advisory board member or consultant for various professional journals and dictionaries, including preparation of American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary..

Martin Mueller writes: I am a Professor of English and Classics at Northwestern University. My primary research field has been the uses of ancient epic and tragedy by European writers since the Renaissance. I have also written on Homer and Shakespeare. More recently I have become interested in the uses of information technology for traditional philological inquiries. Together with Ahuvia Kahane, Craig Berry, and Bill Parod I am the editor of The Chicago Homer, a bilingual Web-accessible database of early Greek epic, published by the University of Chicago Press klast fall.

As for the TEI, I have been a great admirer of the subtle and complex thinking that has gone into its design. At the same time, I doubt whether it can get a foothold beyond a small circle of editors and hackers unless it can become an authoring tool that graduate students or faculty with low technology pain thresholds may find advantageous to use for various projects. My hope is that an appropriately modified version of the TEI-Lite could serve that function and would provide a way of ‘ramping up’ to more complex uses. I see the construction of such a ‘ramp’ as the most promising way of anchoring familiarity with the TEI in the broader community of humanities scholars on whose interest and support the success of the TEI will depend in the long run.

Michael Popham writes: I have a long-standing interest in SGML/XML, and have been following the work of the TEI since its inception. As Head of the Oxford Text Archive, the centre for literature, languages, and linguistics within the UK's national Arts and Humanities Data Service, I am responsible for the management and distribution of an extensive collection of TEI-encoded scholarly materials. The OTA has been an advocate of the TEI's work for many years, and is keen to see the TEI Consortium develop in ways appropriate to the needs of researchers, teachers, and students within the UK's Higher and Further Education communities. In addition to supporting the TEI, I am a Committee Member of XML-UK (the UK Chapter of the International SGML/XML Users' Group), and also a Member of the Committee of the British Computer Society's Electronic Publishing Specialist Group (serving as Chair from 1996 to 2000).

Dr. Geoffrey Martin Rockwell is an Associate Professor of Humanities Computing and Multimedia in the School of the Arts at McMaster University. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Haverford College, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto and worked at the University of Toronto as a Senior Instructional Technology Specialist. He has published and presented papers in the area of textual visualization and analysis, humanities computing, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia.He is currently a co-investigator on three SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada) funded projects that make extensive use of the TEI. He was elected for one year to the TEI Council where he contributed by chairing the subcommittee on training which developed a training strategy and requests for proposals for training initiatives. He is currently the project leader for the CFI (Canada Foundation for Innovation) funded project TAPoR, a Text Analysis Portal for Reasearch, which is developing a text tool portal for researchers who work with electronic texts.

Chris Ruotolo writes: I've worked with TEI for about five years, as Assistant Director and then Associate Director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library. In my new position in Digital Services Integration, one of my goals will be to integrate TEI-encoded SGML texts with other kinds of digital objects, by migrating them to XML and developing crosswalks from the TEI header to more universal metadata schemes. I'm also interested in non-web renderings of TEI-encoded texts (such as ebooks and print-on-demand) and in encodings for non-western character sets. I am currently the chair of the TEI workgroup on SGML-to-XML migration.

Susan Schreibman is Assistant Director Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and Affiliate Assistant Professor of English. She is the General Editor of The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, an SGML/TEI digital archive published at IATH, and developed and maintains Irish Resources in the Humanities, an XML database being delivered through Tamino. She has given many TEI workshops, including those at University Of Maryland, University College Dublin (Ireland) and Malaspina University-College (British Columbia). She has been instrumental in developing The Versioning Machine, which will be launched in October under general public license. The VM is a software tool which allows editors to display multiple witnesses of deeply-encoded text using TEI's parallel-segmentation encoding. She holds a Ph.D. from University College Dublin in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama (1997). Her book publications include Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition: (CUA, 1991). She is currently co-editing the Blackwell Companion to Digital Humanities with Ray Siemens and John Unsworth.

Gary Simons Gary Simons is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs of SIL International (Dallas, Texas). He was active in the committee that developed the TEI's guidelines for text analysis and interpretation (1989-1994) and drafted chapter 26, Feature System Declaration, of the TEI Guidelines. He also served as a member of the TEI's Technical Review Committee (1996-1998). He is currently active in two projects that are seeking to promote text markup as best practice within the language documentation and description community: the Open Language Archives Community and Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Language Data. Prior to taking up his current position, he was Director of SIL's Academic Computing Department (1984-1999) and did field work with SIL in Papua New Guinea (1976) and the Solomon Islands (1977-1983). He received a Ph.D. in general linguistics (with minor emphases in computer science and classics) from Cornell University in 1979.

MacKenzie Smith is the Associate Director for Technology at the MIT Libraries where she works on a variety of library and digital library applications, and directs the DSpace project to build a digital repository system for faculty research material. She writes:

As a digital library technology expect I have always been a strong proponent of standards for digital production in research and publishing. Without good standards, such as the TEI, the work of digital libraries becomes much more difficult and we risk the future of academic and scholarly research. Over the years I have worked with a variety of standards groups, including METS, EAD, OAI, to name just a few, and have learned much about their development and maintenance. The digital library, and indeed the digital media market, have reached a point of maturity and complexity where traditional solutions such as individual consortia supporting a single standard are perhaps no longer sustainable -- we need alternative models to ensure the future of these important standards. In joining the TEI board I would be interested in learning how the needs of the TEI, both technical and financial, differ from other encoding standards, and to help develop models for its sustainable support in the future.

John Walsh writes: I am currently Manager of Electronic Text Technologies with Indiana University's e-text center (LETRS) and Digital Library Program. As such, I am involved in a wide range of e-text and digital library projects. I have eight years experience working with SGML, XML, and the TEI in a library setting. I also hold a Ph.D. in English literature and have a strong interest in the use of markup languages and the TEI as scholarly editorial and critical tools. I am the editor of the Swinburne Project, an on-line, TEI-encoded collection of the works of Victorian poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne. From a technical standpoint, I am an enthusiastic supporter of the now successful effort to bring the TEI into the XML world, and I am interested in using the full range of XML technologies to exploit the possibilities of TEI-encoded texts. I am currently a member of the TEI Workgroup on SGML/XML Conversion. Given the opportunity to serve on the council, I am committed to working hard to keep momentum going on DTD development, education and training development, working group activities, and other efforts of the TEI consortium.